Maintaining Server-side Connection Quality

News

This week, we updated an internal system that we introduced last year to help keep the station healthy, plus we updated our Countries & Listeners (People & Places) list to reflect app-only listeners. For more details, read on!

In 2022, we began using a set of key metrics to help gauge the legitimacy of incoming listener connections to the station. This was implemented in order to prevent bad connection activity from negatively impacting connection quality for genuine listeners. This worked well for the most part, but it did catch a couple legitimate listeners who might leave their player running in the office overnight, or who were using a third-party app that used a new connection to retrieve short segments of music repeatedly over time.

Recently, we updated the way this system works in a way which no genuine listener or normal app activity should ever trip. There haven’t been any issues with listeners in 2023, but if you experience any issues connecting, reach out to the staff team via Discord or email and we’ll get things sorted out.

For the first time since implementing the system, we’ve updated the way that our Countries & Listeners list populates. Previously, a listener would need to have made one login from their current location / IP address, and provided it did not change, a listener could connect to the station at any point in time from then onwards with no active login required.

As of this week, we added app sessions as a second form of retrieving current listeners for shout-outs during our Live shows. With this method, listeners who have logged in to the PWA mobile app will show up in the list provided they are actively listening and they have not changed networks / IPs while roaming. If you can already rate and favorite songs in the PWA, just hit the play button and you’re good to go!

That’s all for this week, hit some stars for song ratings today (and tomorrow), and thanks for listening!

[Knowledge #145]

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